Denzel Washington and the strange case of a very confusing clarification | Denzel Washington

Denzel Washington and the strange case of a very confusing clarification

My thanks to Randall Flagg for alerting me to the curious afterlife of a Denzel Washington interview that we published last month. Please note that I have no wish to thank Randall Flagg in person – partly because he has the same name as the grinning villain in The Stand, and partly because he quite clearly hates my guts. Even so, I'm obliged.

"You are the poster-boy for yellow journalism," he tweeted. "Next time don't edit someone's words to make them seem racist." Flagg added that if the Guardian was worth its salt, it would fire me instantly and then issue a public apology to Denzel Washington.

My initial thought was that the tweeter's annoyance was somehow related to a portion of the interview in which Washington mentioned that he had never befriended any white actors. But it still didn't make much sense. Why was Flagg so certain I had deliberately edited Washington to "make him seem racist"?

It transpires, though, that Flagg's annoyance was entirely understandable. Because last week one of Washington's public relations representatives stepped forward to offer their version of what Washington had said. "I sat in on this interview," Yahoo quotes the rep as saying. "The part they fail to mention was that after [Washington] said 'never befriended any white actors' he mentioned 'except' and then listed Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts etc. They cut the rest of the thought out."

So fair enough, and small wonder the tweeter wants my head on a stick. But there is just one problem: the rep's version is basically a fiction. This clarification requires a clarification of its own.

Yes, OK, full disclosure – I did edit what Washington said. I do this a lot, in pretty much every interview, for the simple reason that real people do not converse in newspaper copy. Real people repeat themselves and circle back in search of clarity. We choose the wrong words and then fumble for the right ones. We say "Errr" and we say "Arrrr" incessantly, and we talk over each other too. I sometimes worry that a truly accurate transcript of my interviews (perhaps of any interview) would read like the ramblings of two drunken lunatics on a bench in the park.

Here, for instance, is the Washington quote as it appeared in the article:

"Being African-American, there were no big movie stars to hang out with anyway, not when I was starting out, they were just the third guy from the back! For whatever reason, I never befriended any white actors."

And here, embarrassingly, is the actual exchange as it took place. At this point Washington had been talking about his early years in Hollywood ("when I was starting out"):

Washington: And being African-American, we weren't … [pause]

Me: You're in a minority anyway.

Washington: Yeah. There were no big movie stars to hang out with anyway.

Me: They were just the guys holding open the doors.

Washington: Yeah, right. Exactly. Third guy from the back! And, and, for whatever reason, I never befriended any white actors. I mean, I worked with them. But I didn't, I didn't, I just didn't … You know what? I didn't need to do that."

Now here's the thing. While I have no reason to doubt Washington's friendship with Tom Hanks and the like, that is not what he said to me. Nor, for that matter, was there a public relations representative sitting in on our interview – although they may conceivably have been hiding silently in the armoire, where I couldn't see them.

So why all the fuss? Reports claim that the actor's remark has already "ruffled feathers" in the US. If so, that's one alarmingly delicate bird we're dealing with – a jumpy, neurotic creature that is probably better off being ignored altogether. To do otherwise, I think, runs the risk of crisis-managing a problem that wasn't there to begin with.

Is there room for one last clarification before we put this behind us? This one goes out to Randall Flagg specifically. I very much enjoyed speaking to Denzel Washington. And while I never felt I found out a whole lot about him (my fault, not his), he struck me as warm and smart and often candid – a talented actor who values his privacy and has a genuine distaste for the celebrity circuit. At no point, not ever, did I think he was being racist. At no point did I edit him to give that impression. And, finally, had Denzel Washington deigned to tell me he was friends with Mel Gibson, you can bet I would have printed it. Revelations like that have a price above rubies.

 Update: the day after this piece was published, the Guardian received a response from Denzel Washington's personal publicist. He explained that his office had nothing to do with the statement which has been credited to "one of Washington's public relations representatives" across a number of news and gossip sites.

We are now following the matter up with the site that appears to have originally published the story.

 Update at 18:30 GMT 28 February: We have published a followup story here.

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